Obama’s new ‘AttackWatch.com’ website smells like political fear

By David McElroy · September 14, 2011

One of the first things you learn in politics is to never repeat the charges that your opponent makes about you. It’s counter-intuitive for most people, but after you’ve been in the business for awhile, you learn that if you defend yourself by explaining what your opponents are saying — and why they’re wrong — you end up reinforcing what the opponents are saying, even if they’re wrong.

Because of that, I’m shocked to see Barack Obama’s re-election campaign falling into one of the worst traps I’ve ever seen. The campaign has set up a website that it calls “AttackWatch.com.”

If you set up a site that talks about the lies your enemy is telling about you, all you’re doing is giving them — and their lies — publicity. I know it appeals to the rational side of the brain to respond, but I guarantee that it doesn’t work 98 times out of 100.

If your opponent is attacking you, the way to respond is to attack back, putting the opponent on the defensive. But if you’re a sitting U.S. president, you don’t do anything except sell yourself — without even talking about your opponents.

My point here isn’t to give advice to Obama. He can afford much higher-priced advice than I am. It’s simply to point out that people in the Obama camp are scared. I assume they’re looking at poll numbers and starting to get worried that he might be a one-term president.

I’m sure that the new AttackWatch site will be popular among Obama supporters. The people who love you are always happy with you go on the offensive to “set the record straight,” because they honestly believe it works. (Everyone has a cognitive bias for assuming that explaining things from his point of view will make others suddenly see the light.) But all it’s really going to do, in my opinion, is bring more attention to the charges that are being made. It’s a very bad idea.

The fact that Obama’s advisors are scared enough to do something such as this would give me hope if there were anybody on the Republican side who I thought would do a better job. I do think a Republican has a decent shot at winning next year, but I don’t have any hope that anyone with the right ideas is going to take Obama’s place.

The U.S. presidency is an odd case of musical chairs right now. No matter who’s sitting there when the collapse happens, that person isn’t going to be the one to blame alone. It’s been a bi-partisan mess for many decades. They all have reason to be scared about how history is going to view them.

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Stories about young people running away from home often don’t end well, but I just heard a story of a good outcome. The young woman who shared her story with me isn’t a child, though. She’s in her early 20s, but she ran away from home last year. She lived in Michigan with her dysfunctional family. Her mom was addicted to meth and various prescription drugs. She was the only one in the family who worked — and her family took almost all of the money she earned. The only bright spot in her life was a guy she met online playing a video game. The two grew close and fell in love. About 18 months ago, she secretly packed everything she owned — and he drove from Birmingham to Michigan to pick her up without her family’s knowledge. Today, they’re married and have a new baby. She says leaving her family was the second best thing that ever happened to her — and her husband and baby are the best. “He doesn’t seem to understand what a big deal it was,” she said, “but he saved my life. I took a big risk and he did, too, but I’m happy and loved for the first time in my life.” It might not be common, but some runaway stories do end well.

This is apparently what I would look like as a woman, at least according to a ridiculous app called FaceApp that I’ve been playing with late Thursday night. (Find links for iOS and Android here.) It’s been around for a couple of years, but I just downloaded the free version and had some fun. I’m happy to say that the app has diplomatically given me a bit of liposuction in the process, so this is probably more like what I might look like as a woman who’s about 70 pounds lighter. My sisters were both beautiful young women — and one of them annoyed her classmates by winning a beauty contest and then never caring enough about it to mention it again — so maybe our genes are better for females than males. Give it a try. It’s silly, but it’s fun.

Missing someone always seems worst in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe it’s because our days are filled with things that distract us with tasks to accomplish and then we find ourselves alone at night with our thoughts and feelings. I’ve been having trouble sleeping for many months, but I rarely try to explain why, even though I know very clearly. As an evening drags on and it becomes more silent, I seem to be left with the best and the worst of my hopes and fears. And that makes it hard to turn my brain off and go to sleep. In one of her private letters, writer Edna St. Vincent Millay voiced what I feel: “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” But would you erase love for someone from your mind to be rid of that torture? In the movie, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” that’s the central premise, although it takes a long time to understand what’s going on. Two people start out wanting to forget one another, but it turns out that forgetting is even more painful. There’s nothing better than experiencing real love. Living with lost love is terribly painful, but not as painful as losing the part of yourself that still knows how to love unconditionally.

Most parents have been brainwashed to believe that the only responsible way to educate their children is to put them into the hands of “professionals.” These are most commonly government employees who are teaching a curriculum dictated by politicians, but the people from whom children learn the most in traditional schools are their peers. As the culture becomes more dysfunctional and increasingly leads children down dangerous paths, parents are in denial, believing “that happens in other schools” — that their children are safe and well-served in their schools. And let’s be honest. Most parents simply have no interest in putting in the sort of work that would be necessary to give their children a first-rate education that’s less regimented, more personalized and more empowering. It used to be that learning at home was reserved for “religious nuts” and dysfunctional people, but that’s no longer the case. Various forms of non-traditional learning are becoming more accepted. In this eye-opening article, the Foundation for Economic Education lists 100 reasons you should consider teaching your kids at home — and each reason has documentation to back it up. Your children deserve more than any government-run “warehouse for kids” can possibly give them.

I was raised in a very polite culture. We were nice to everybody, even the ones we didn’t like. I carried this attitude into my adult life and even into social media. But I’m increasingly unwilling to put up with people who annoy me. A part of me feels guilty for saying that, but life is too short to put up with people who constantly annoy me. I have a choice. I can decline to associate with such people — without judging their worth as human beings — and there’s no reason for me to feel guilty about it. In some parts of my life, I don’t always have an immediate choice about who crosses my path. But I’m responsible for choosing who I associate with in my personal life and on social media. My new rule of thumb is that if every comment someone makes causes me to scream, “You are a moron,” inside my head, he has to go. I don’t mind people disagreeing with me because of differing values or reasoning, but there’s no reason to tolerate those who constantly annoy us. We have to right and the power to choose who we associate with.

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